Reply To: Traffic tanked after a clean-up

[Nathan]

Yeah, I’d still blame the cleanup before I blame some mystical Google mood swing. I’ve had a couple sites do the same thing after pruning. Usually it’s not the “junk” pages themselves, it’s the links and crawl paths you accidentally took out with them. Money pages can look fine on the surface and still lose a bunch of the weak internal support they were leaning on. The impressions-with-no-clicks part is the annoying bit though. That usually smells like ranking shuffling / snippet weirdness / intent mismatch more than a straight deindex. If a page was hanging around page 2 and then vanished, I’d check whether it’s still getting crawled and whether it got pushed down by something fresher or just lost internal prominence. Honestly, I’d stop touching it for a bit. Every time people start “fixing” it again right after a prune, they just keep stirring the pot.